The Refashioners Community Challenge finished on the last day of September, last Friday, with an extraordinary response. Not having been involved before I had no idea how many people would take part, I think perhaps nobody else did either because it seems to have been much bigger than last year.

There was an extraordinary variety of entries, some on slightly similar themes, but on the whole all different. It’s going to be very difficult for Portia Lawrie, who runs the challenge, to pick the winners, but I’m sure everybody who took part has gained something just by being creative and having a go. I know that I have also gained a lot of ideas for future projects, not by copying what others have done but by using their work as a spark to ignite more ideas. It’s always possible to look at a project and think ‘now what if you changed that bit, or used this part to add to something else?’

I’ve been working on my entries for the Australian Sewing Guild convention challenge as well. This year the theme is ‘put a wrinkle in it’ which opens up all sort of possibilities. I decided to enter all three categories, which was probably a mistake since I don’t think I’ve really had time to do justice to any of them. The three categories are garment, fashion accessory, and home decor accessory. For the garment I cheated a bit and used a shirt which I made for a workshop on sharks teeth that I ran at our neighbourhood group last year. It has two panels of sharks teeth tucks in the front, one vertical down one side and the other horizontal across the yoke. I’ve found now that I didn’t take any photos of it at the time, but here is one of another similar shirt I made many years ago.

My fashion accessory entry is a bag, not finished yet, and the home decor accessory is a trio of pincushions, masquerading as cupcakes. I didn’t get time to photograph them before sending them off either, so they will have to wait. They were pretty complicated to make, so they probably need a blog post all on their own. Next time!